Eric McFarland

Contacts

Research Description

Our research is focused on understanding and developing new catalysts for the production of fuel. We utilize novel synthesis and characterization methods with emphasis on developing high-throughput experimentation technologies for combinatorial materials research. The group is presently using combinatorial chemistry to investigate new photocatalytic systems for energy production and investigating fundamental chemical processes on atomically doped oxide catalysts.

Biography

After his undergraduate studies at U.C. Berkeley, McFarland moved to M.I.T. where he completed his Ph.D. investigating the measurement of complex reaction kinetics with nuclear magnetic resonance. While a graduate student, McFarland was a member of a team at Field Effects Inc. that designed and built the first permanent ring magnet based magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system. He received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and, after post-graduate training in general surgery, worked part-time in the Emergency Medicine. He joined the Department of Nuclear Engineering at MIT and then later moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara where his research interests moved to chemical kinetics and catalysis specifically related to energy production. He has broad ranging research interests with direct links to industrial problems and has published over 130 papers and is the inventor on over 25 patents. In 1996, during a leave of absence from the University, McFarland was a founding technical Director of Symyx Technologies, a technology company which developed novel systems and methods for new materials discovery. He was a part of the core management team as the company grew from 3 employees to over 150 and eventually had a successful public offering. He has been on the Board of Directors of several chemical and technology companies and has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of GRT Inc. a start-up company developing a new process for the production of liquid fuels and chemicals from natural gas.